


Unbelievers

by roachpatrol



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: F/M, Multi, Ocean Adventures, Post-War, Retired Yeerk Nothlits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 10:17:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3116414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hello,” you send to the humans as broadly and politely as you can. “Can any of you spare some assistance? This calf is tangled up in netting and we can’t get it off ourselves.”</p>
<p>There is a great deal of jostling and muttering, and then one human calls out, bitterly, accusingly: “<i>Yeerk!</i>”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unbelievers

**Author's Note:**

> (thanks to lizardlicks for the beta)
> 
> *
> 
> _If I’m born again I know that the world will disagree_   
> _Want a little grace but who’s gonna say a little grace for me?_
> 
> *

 

You’re swimming slowly along and working on a new composition when a ragged thought-speak cry comes into your mind.

“Hello? Hello, are you— are you someone?”

You roll in the water to turn an eye towards the source of the voice, and find an orca swimming hurriedly towards you.

“I suppose I am,” you send back, a little amused.

“Oh, _wonderful_ ,” the orca says, and pulls to a halt right at your snout. “Estreen 452,” she introduces herself.

“Aftriss 329,” you reply. The orca flips a fin and regards you with a bright, dark eye.

“Sub-Visser nine,” she says, very respectfully. “I’ve heard of you. You headed up the portable Kandrona project, didn’t you?”

You give a blue whale’s approximation of a palp-shrug. “In another life,” you say. “The war is over, you know. There isn’t any more point to a hierarchy.”

“Yes, yes,” the orca agrees. “I won’t stand on ceremony. But, sub-vissier, could I perhaps ask you for some assistance? Our— the calf of myself and my partner, she’s been tangled up in some netting. Harslin tried to solicit help from a passing boat but…” she gives a palp shrug herself. “The war is not quite over for some,” she says.

“Is your partner alright?”

“Oh, yes, he’s back with the calf, doing what he can to keep her calm. I thought perhaps I could find a single diver, or another boat, but perhaps you might...?“

You stroke the orca’s side with the tip of one of your long, long fins. The extreme size difference between earth cetaceans calls for delicate manners, sometimes, but already you’re recalling long hours spent feeding and planning with your subordinates, twining with them, playing the part of a dignified and resourceful authority.  “Of course I might. We’ll certainly get this sorted out together— I doubt many humans are eager to turn their feelers away from someone my size.”

“Oh, _thank you_ ,” the orca— Estreen— says, and turns herself about with a quick flick of her fins. “Here, it’s right this way…” She takes off in a blur of black and white, tail pumping hard enough to rock you in place. You heave yourself around, much more ponderously, and follow.

 

*

 

The two of you don’t have that far to travel, though Estreen is breaching for air regularly with how hard she pushes herself to stay ahead of your long, powerful strokes. The shapes of a male orca and a small calf come suddenly out of the gloom ahead and you backfin smoothly, in order to float a cautious ways away from them. Despite your care you still send the calf tumbling end over end, and the male orca lunges for you, his formidable teeth clamping on the front edge of your left fin.

You cry out in pain. Nothing on Earth and few creatures elsewhere can cry like a blue whale.

“Harslin, _no_ , Harslin 796, cut it out!” Estreen cries, shoving her partner with her snout. “This is Sub-Visser Aftriss 329, they’re here to help the calf! Let go!”

Harslin lets go, and kicks backwards with a hasty jerk. Blood billows out into the water and with the vibrant bloom of color it strikes you all over again—it always strikes you at strange moments— how beautiful it is to have sight and scent, how strange and wonderful it is to be alive and aware in a world with so much to experience. Even pain.   

“I’m sorry, I’m— I beg your pardon,” Harslin is stammering, cringing away as Estreen noses anxiously at your fin.

You waggle it, decide, “No, it’s alright, I’m alright,”  then you dare to perform a slow reassuring twine around him. You outmass orcas as if they were the freshest new fry at the pool but at the gesture Harslin still relaxes and slides one small fin across the massive grooves of your belly, a ghost of a palp-to-palp embrace. You are unexpectedly touched, and when you straighten out of your slow roll you regard the two very warmly.

“Well, then,” you say, “let’s see your little problem.”

The calf is twisting and bucking in the water, crying out piteously for her parents. She’s terrified by you and by the pain of the vivid orange and yellow fibers tangled all around her. Estreen goes to her and nudges her up to the surface to breathe, and she gasps and cries.

“We tried to get it off with our teeth,” Harslin says, his thought-speak rattling with worry. “Orcas have sharp teeth, we’re predators... But she wouldn’t hold still, and after Estreen bit her on accident we didn’t dare to keep trying.”

“I understand. It’s times like this you really wish you had some hands, don’t you,” you say, examining the hopeless tangle of netting.

“While you’re at it, wish for a tail blade,” Estreen says, startling a laugh out of you.

The calf thrashes painfully again, and cries shrilly.

“Doesn’t she talk?” you ask, a bit surprised that she hasn’t already. “Hello, little one,” you tell her directly, but she turns her head away, burying herself in awkward squirms against her mother’s side.

“No, she’s purely orca,” Harslin says. “We’d hoped the thought-speak ability might be passed on, but it seems to be only a function of the morphing technology.” He adds, defensively, “We’re working on a good vocabulary of vocalizations, though, and getting her properly integrated with the local family groups. She’s very smart.”

“She’s lovely,” You say, “You must be happy.” He nods, shy and diffident all over again. You wonder what generation he hails from, if he’s one of the mad, eager thousands spawned just for the earth invasion. He seems very young.

“We’ll all be happier when we can get this mess fixed,” Estreen says briskly. She’s got a tougher mantle, you think, a bit more iron in her spine, as the vertebrates might say. Now that she’s calmed down from her headlong rush she is poised and ready.

“Here, can she swim?” you ask. “Ah, no. Well, I suppose I could carry her.”

“On your… on your back?” Harslin asks doubtfully. “Will she stay?”

“I could take her in my mouth,” you offer, and show your baleen plates. “No fangs, see? She won’t like it but it might be the easiest way.”

Estreen comes over and examines your mouth, and you think on how absurd this might look had the two of you human host bodies, one human pressing a beaky nose and then a soft pink hand to another’s shearing, grinding omnivore dentition—and imagine if you were controlling a taxxon! But you are well and truly toothless, now, and you know the bristle-combs of your baleen hardly scratch at the orca’s flipper. You will never again rend and tear, you will never again chew your way through living flesh. You chose your final form very carefully.  

“Well, let’s give it a shot,” Estreen finally says, and nudges her child forward. The calf has a flipper horribly pinned to her side, and welts coming up along her tail, and she thrashes and squeals with fear when she’s pressed between your jaws. Her parents croon and call to her, soothing as best they can.

“Remember cars?” you ask wryly, trying to grip the calf firmly but not painfully. “With child seats, and a gameboy to distract the little monsters.”

“Bug fighters with cargo holds,” Harslin sighs, still crooning and clicking. “ _Soundproof_ cargo holds.”

“Harslin!” Estreen protests, but her mind’s voice is thickly shaded with laughter, and you find yourself laughing as well— and with your throat, too, a long low rumble. The calf whimpers.

“Well, here we go,” you say, and set off.

 

*

 

With a child to not terrify, you don’t dare send out sonar pulses of your own and have to rely on the orcas’ guidance. One parent stays with you, darting reassuringly all around your snout and his or her child, nudging you up to the surface at intervals so she can breathe, while the other parent makes great wide circles, scouting for a ship. When you feel the water start to grow rough and ragged you realize you must be coming up to the shore.

“Where are we, anyway?” you ask idly. “Off northern California? I went up to the arctic circle this last summer and lost track of which bit of coastline was which, really…”

“Oregon, I think,” Estreen says, paddling tiredly alongside you. “So if we go down the coast we’ll find fishermen sooner or later. Or a port town. Something.”

“Far enough and we’ll give some sunbathers a show,” you muse, and she snorts.

“Seaworld, here we come,” she says, but she’s anxious under the show of bright determination. It’s nearly evening, and humans aren’t much fond of things that go bump in the night. You don’t know if the calf can stand too many more hours of this. You don’t want to ask.

“I found someone!” Harslin calls, at the very edge of your thought-speak range, “whale watchers! I’m headi …wards them now… n you…” his mind voice fades to a muddled, urgent excitement, but then you hear a high chattering location call, far off to your left. It fades away, and Estreen calls out, nearly the same sound— the chatter comes again. _Marco, pollo_ , you think wryly, as the two of you swing around and make towards Harslin’s calls. Hope buoys each stroke of your flukes.

The whale watchers aren’t far off the coast, and the chop of the waves against the jagged stones and spires of the cliffside shoreline is neither easy nor safe to navigate for a creature your size. You approach slowly, listening intently to the whale watchers churning towards you. The calf thrashes and cries out again, thoroughly frightened by the awful grinding noise of a mechanical engine, and you finally let her go. Harslin comes back and he and his partner bracket the calf, nuzzling and crooning, keeping her blowhole above the water. She doesn’t seem too much the worse for wear from her trip, and you are relieved— you were worried she might have worn herself raw against your plates, or cut herself further on the netting.

The boat pulls up near to the four of you, and, seeing Harslin and Estreen are too busy attending to their calf, you roll one eye out of the water to regard them.

“Hello,” you send to the humans as broadly and politely as you can. “Can any of you spare some assistance? This calf is tangled up in netting and we can’t get it off ourselves.”

There is a great deal of jostling and muttering, and then one human calls out, bitterly, accusingly: “ _Yeerk!_ ”

Harslin makes a quiet grieving squeak, and sinks below surface. Estreen growls.

“Yes we are,” you say, still politely. “But this calf is just an orca, and injured, and I would appreciate the kindness of a knife and a pair of hands.”

“If you wanted those you should have won the fucking war!” another human yells, and there is much scandalized tittering. A few of the men whoop and high-five.

“I’m going to ram the boat,” Estreen growls, and you push her back with a sharp stroke of your flipper.  

“The war is over,” you tell the clustered humans. “Please. Please, she’s a child. She was never in any war.”

“Oh my god if you jackasses are just going to stand there and posture—” a human snaps, a woman, and shoves to front of the crowd. She has a bright orange lifejacket on, and waves some kind of pocket knife at you. “Here, you think this’ll do?”

“Yes, perfectly well,” you say, grateful beyond measure, and backfin a stroke or two to give her room to climb into the water. She curses as she does so. It’s late in the season, and the evening. The ocean must be very cold to her, but she splashes gamely in nonetheless and then paddles along your side. She grabs your fin.

“Okay, take me over,” she says, and you turn carefully about. She’s so small: humans are so fantastically small to you now, as soft and small as mice. As soft and small as a yeerk might have been to a human.

The woman flounders over to the orcas, and gracelessly treads water. “Okay, hi,” she pants. “Let’s get ‘er done fast, before we lose the light, or I lose some fingers.”

“Thank you,” Harslin says, “thank you, thank you—“

Estreen nudges her calf over to the human’s reaching hands. The calf bucks, shivers, and then whimperingly hangs still.

The three of you try to support the human with your sides and flippers, so that she doesn’t tire, but it’s awkward for all of you and the calf doesn’t make it much easier. The human diligently saws away with her knife and pulls the netting off bit by bit, and curses when she cuts herself or the black and white hide under what must be increasingly numb hands.

Finally, with a yank and a flourish, the woman rips the last bit of netting away, and waves the knife above her head with a whoop. Harslin and Estreen roar with joy and the calf jets off, bucking and spinning, breaching the water in an enormous leap of relief and pleasure. Harslin takes off after her, cheering, and the two leap and flop and splash all over one another. The calf has the habit of twining affectionately against her parents, as a yeerk might her comrades. It is strange to see on a terrestrial creature, something the war never touched, someone who would never know the blind warmth and ease of a pool, but beautiful.

The humans on the boat are taking pictures, and video. You want to splash them, although records of the evil yeerk scum and his child playing together like children— like the children they are— can only be to the good for humans to show one another.

“I never knew there was a war on until the news channels started telling me we won,” the woman is telling Estreen. “And I mean, it’s kind of awful, everything that happened, but there’s a lot more whales now. I think that’s pretty great. And you guys are like your own people now, right? You’re free too?”

You look at Estreen. Estreen looks at you.

“Yes,” you say. “We’re all free.”

“Well, then it all worked out,” the woman says. “Can I have a ride back to the boat? I’m freezing my mammaries off out here.”

“Yes,” you say and proffer your flipper. “And thank you, sincerely, you’ve done us an enormous service.”

“Aren’t you polite!” she says, hanging on to you. “A polite alien whale. A whalien. That takes the cake.”

You guide her back to the boat as she chatters, and then raise your forehead out of the water far enough that she can clamber up the vast dome of your head, balance there for a long minute, and then hop over the railing and into the arms of her fellow humans. They cheer for her, thump her on the back, declare her a hero. In all the self-congratulatory fuss, you slip under the water, join Estreen, and swim away.

 

*

 

You travel down the coast a while, companionably, tiredly, and then Harslin spots a pod of seals and gives chase. You and Estreen settle into the rock and sway of the ocean currents, and the calf comes up to her mother to nurse.

Estreen says, “Well—” her thoughtspeak shaking with relief, breaking with it. “Well, then. Well.”

You start to hum, quietly, and only realize you’re following the tune of _Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star_ when Estreen joins in, her orca’s voice high and piping against the slow deep sub-sonic rumble of a blue whale’s song. It’s been a long time since you’ve had to sing a lullaby, or had anyone to sing a lullaby to: you never saw your last host’s children again, after the end of the war. You don’t even know if they survived it. Harslin comes back in the middle of the second verse dragging most of a seal and laughs brightly, joining in at hardly a lower register than his partner’s, and by the end of the song the calf is drifting sleepily, mumbling to herself in what you can only suppose is orca baby-talk.

“We can’t thank you enough.” Harslin says, nudging up against you as Estreen attends to the seal. “We’d have been lost— _she’d_ have been—”

“No, no, it was fine. It was good to have a bit of a mission again,” you say. “I should be thanking you two for giving me something to do, really.”

“Well…” Harslin says, awkwardly. “Any time, you know. No problem.”

Estreen twists in the water, twining with her sleepy calf, then she comes over and rubs her side to the long pleats of your throat. You remember the thick warm pools of your childhood, the soft and careless companionship you shared with your generation before any of you were old enough for war.

“You might come along with us, for a while, Sub-Visser,” Estreen says, tentatively. “We’re sure to get into more trouble, without someone like you in command.”

“Oh— _oh_ , yes!” Harslin agrees, graceless in his enthusiasm. “Yes, certainly. It’s a big ocean, anything could happen, and of course then there’s the calf to consider. It wouldn’t do her any harm to have a bit of authority around.”

You are deeply touched, breathlessly touched, and it is only now that the full crushing weight of the last few years’ loneliness really closes in on you. Blue whales are solitary creatures.

Yeerks… yeerks are not.

“Well,” you say, and have to take a moment compose yourself and your mind’s voice. “I could stand a bit more action,” you say. “But lay off with the rank and file, would you? The war’s over.”

“Yes, Sub-Visser,” Estreen says, smiling an orca’s broad, bright smile.

“Just as you say, Sub-Visser,” Harslin agrees.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> _See the sun go down_   
> _It’s going on down, and the night is deep_   
> _Want a little light_   
> _But who’s gonna save a little light for me?_
> 
> —Vampire Weekend, _Unbelievers_


End file.
